


Episode Coda:  3x10  Hauak’l Kula --  Living Room Camping

by DalWriter



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Bromance, Camping, Episode Related, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-25 17:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DalWriter/pseuds/DalWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny tries to impress upon Steve what are and what are not appropriate topics for pre-teen Aloha Girls before the three of them sack out in the tent in Danny’s living room.  Morning is awkward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Episode Coda:  3x10  Hauak’l Kula --  Living Room Camping

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of transformative fiction. I don’t own the characters; I’m just playing with them. It’s also my first attempt at an episode continuation in this fandom. The work has not be beta'd; all errors are mine.

Danny had just handed the first slice to Grace when there was another knock on his door.  “Be right back, Monkey,” he promises huffing as he unzips the tent flap.  Padding over to the door, he yanks it open only somewhat surprised to see Steve standing there.  “What?”

“Whaddya mean ‘what’?” Steve replies moving through Danny to enter the cluttered apartment.  “Where’s Grace?” he asks looking at the tent which practically fills the entire small living room.

“In here, Uncle Steve,” the little girl giggles between mouthfuls of pizza.

The SEAL crawls into the tent with his honorary niece.  “Oooh, pizza.  Got any with ham and pineapple?” he jokingly asks, loud enough for Danny to hear him outside.

“How is this my life?” Danny sulks, following his partner into the tent.

Grace puts her own slice down on the open top of the box and hands Steve a pepperoni slice. “You know how Danno feels about pizza, Uncle Steve,” she reminds him.

Taking a bite, he mumbles with a mouth full of pizza, “Sauce, dough and mozz.  Yeah, yeah, I know.”  After he swallows, Steve continues, “Danno doesn’t know what’s good, does he?”

“Yes, he does,” Danny defends his choices. “Pineapple on pizza is an abomination.  Extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, peppers and mushrooms maybe even anchovies, if you’re into that sort of thing, but fruit, . . . fruit, my friend, does not belong on pizza.  Ever.”

Grace rolls her eyes at the familiar and comforting banter between her dad and his partner.  She tries unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle as she continues to eat her own slice, which she has properly folded in half, the way pizza should be eaten. 

Upon finishing his slice in a few bites, Steve looks around the tent which is fairly cramped given the fact that it’s currently housing two grown men, one little girl and an open pizza box.  “Got anything to drink?”

Holding up a bottle that is about ¾ full, Grace offers, “You can have some of my water.”

“There’s more water, soda and beer in the ‘fridge.  Get me one too,” Danny instructs.  When Steve doesn’t immediately move, Danny glances down at his bandaged arm, silently reminding everyone that he was shot – again. 

Steve obligingly climbs out of the tent and returns with two bottles of cold water.  “So living room camping?”

“Yes, living room camping,” Danny confirms.  “Where there are no spiders, snakes, bears, wild boars, sudden downpours or crazed gunman.”

“Uncle Steve, you never did teach us how to kill a wild boar,” Grace tries to change the subject.

“And he never will,” Danny cuts off that line of conversation.  In his peripheral vision he can see Steve gesturing to his daughter that someday he will, in fact, teach her how to kill a boar but they have to keep it a secret from Danny. 

Not wanting to start a fight or worse a lecture, Grace tries again.  “Will you teach me to throw a knife like you did?”

Sliding his k-bar out of one of the pockets of his cargo pants, Steve unsheathes it and begins to open the blade. “First. . .”

Grabbing his wrist, Danny shouts, “You will not and I repeat, not, teach my daughter or any of her eleven year old friends how to throw a knife!  Put that away.”

Seeing the stern look on his partner’s face, Steve acquiesces, although he can’t help but voice token opposition to Danny’s directive.  “It’s a good life skill.”

Seeing Steve fold the knife, Danny drops the volume slightly, “A good life skill if you’re a Navy SEAL, not an eleven year old girl.”

“We could take her to the range with us tomorrow,” Steve offers.

“The range?  You think we could take my sweet, innocent daughter to a gun range?!” Danny yells.  “No, Steven, we cannot take my daughter to a gun range.”

“It’s kids’ day,” Steve supplies.

“Kids’ day?” Danny can’t believe his ears.  “What kind of place has ‘kids’ day’ at a gun range?”

“It sounds like fun, Danno. Can we go?” Grace asks hopefully.

Looking at his guileless child as though she’d grown an extra head, Danny refuses.  “No we cannot go to kids’ day at a gun range.”

“Danny, think about it.  If the girls had been armed. . .”

Danny is positively incredulous.  “If the girls had been armed?! Are you out of your mind? Aloha Girls are about camp fires, and sing-a-longs and patches.  Here, look at the nice patch Grace gave me.”  He hands the aforementioned patch to Steve for closer inspection. “They are not about guns and ammo.”

Handing the patch back, “Gun safety is important,” Steve reminds him, like Danny could ever forget. “Grace spends time here in your house with a gun.  She spends time with me with guns.”  Shifting his hips Steve shows Danny that he is armed even as they sit in Danny’s living room.  It’s a fact of a cop’s life. “She comes to the Palace, where there are lots of guns.  She needs to know how to be safe around guns.”

“She knows how to be safe.  She knows never to touch my gun, or any gun.  Right, Monkey?” He practically glares at his daughter.

“Yes, Danno,” she replies dutifully.

“That’s not enough, Danny.  She has to know how to use a gun.”

“She’s eleven years old, Steve.”

Trying to be helpful Grace interjects, “I’m almost twelve.”

Steve beams at her. “She’s almost twelve.”

Danny can only stare. 

“Please, Danno?” Grace begs, not sure exactly what she’s asking for but knowing that if Uncle Steve is involved it has to be cool. 

“Don’t ‘please Danno’ me.  You are not going to a gun range.  You are not going to learn to throw knives.  You will not kill a wild boar.”

Steve studies Danny not understanding what the problem is.  “My dad took me to the range when I was ten.”

“Your Dad. . .” Danny begins.  An insult is on the tip of his tongue but he just can’t bring himself to disparage the elder McGarrett knowing that the precious time at the range is probably one of the few happy memories Steve has of his late father.  He sighs. 

“What about Steve’s Dad, Danno?”  Grace asks, genuinely curious.  She has never thought about Steve having a dad, about Steve being a kid.  “What was your dad like, Uncle Steve?”

Steve’s relationship with his father was strained to say the least. He smiles sadly at Grace, trying to come up with the right answer to her innocuous question.  Not every kid has a father like Danny who will move half way around the world just to be with her.  “He, . . he was a good cop, like Danno.  He wanted to keep the islands safe.”

That answer seems to satisfy the little girl.  Danny smiles at his partner.  Apparently you can teach an old seal new tricks. 

“So are you going to stay for the whole living room camping experience?” Danny asks.  Maybe if he distracts them with other activities, his companions will forget about the gun range.

Looking around the tight space, Steve contemplates his options.  “I dunno.  I think I’d miss the smell of the campfire, the stars. . . .”

“Danno made toasted marshmallows,” Graces offers trying to entice Steve to stay.

The SEAL looks at his partner quizzically.  In response Danny holds up a Scripto ™ lighter.  Steve nods his approval.  “Well as long as there are marshmallows.”  Steve stabs one of the fluffy blobs onto the end of the stick and holds it out for Danny to toast. 

After obliging, Danny reminds Steve to stash his weapons in the lock box in the bedroom.  When he returns Steve has stowed all his gear and has taken off his shoes. He is now walking around in just his socks like Danny.  “So what are we doing first?”

They sing a few off key campfire songs.  Steve tells a ghost story about an ancient monster that roams the islands and steals the souls of the unworthy.  Danny tells a story about the New Jersey Devil that lives in the Pine Barrens and attacks sailors and surfers.  Even though the New Jersey Devil is said to resemble a dragon with a horse’s head and a snake-like body complete with forked tail and bat wings, Grace is confident that if it tried to attack Steve, he could defeat it because what’s a monster in the face of her SuperSEAL? Before he finished his story, Grace had stretched out on her sleeping bag between the two men and fallen asleep.  Once they were certain she was out, Steve looked up at Danny expectantly as if to say “now what?”

Jerking his head toward the flap, Danny signals him to exit.  After the grown men clamber out of the tent, Steve settles on the couch while Danny throws out the empty pizza box and grabs two beers for them out of the ‘fridge. 

“So, I haven’t gone living room camping in a long time,” Steve admits with a goofy grin, tilting his longneck toward Danny’s bottle until they made a soft clink. 

“Yeah,”  Danny agrees.  “The rough and tumble stuff is more your style.”  He lets that hang in the air for a moment.  “About that. . .”

“What?” Steve is genuinely confused. 

Taking a deep breath Danny plunges forward knowing this was going to be hard to hear.  “You know. . . .there are certain things that are appropriate to talk to little girls about and things like killing wild boar, throwing knives and firing guns are not on that list.”

Scrunching up his face, Steve tries to process what Danny is telling him.  “Kono does all those things.  In fact she was with us the first time I killed a boar for the kalua pig we steamed in the imu the Christmas I was 17.” 

“Kono is the exception to almost every rule about little girls,” Danny begins.

“Don’t you want Grace and her friends to grow up to be self-assured and able to defend themselves?”

Sighing, Danny conceeds, “Of course I do, but some of the other parents, well they’d really prefer that you didn’t teach that stuff to their little princesses.”

“We’re not talking about all of the girls, although maybe we should be.  Women need to be able to protect themselves.  Look at Catherine,” Steve asserts.

Shaking his head, Danny tries to redirect the conversation.  “Yes.  You are surrounded by strong, capable women:  Kono, Catherine and let’s not forget dear old Doris.”

Steve smirks.  He knew Danny was none too fond of his long lost mother miraculously resurrected from the dead.

“Nonetheless, . . . ” 

Steve mocks him, “Nonetheless?”

“Yes, nonetheless.  It’s a perfectly good word,” Danny is unfazed by this aspect of their debate.  For all of his teasing, Steve is a brilliant well educated man – an Annapolis grad and a Naval Intelligence Officer – not the accomplishments of a dummy.  “Now, as I was saying, you have to be careful about what you talk to these impressionable girls about.  They are little girls.”

“I know that!”  Steve insists.  “Lucy was very brave out there.  She really earned her first aid patch.  She didn’t cry or anything.”

“Until she got home,” Danny mumbles but Steve hears him and the SEAL’s eyes widened.  The last thing he wanted was for one of those girls to get hurt.  Silently he urges Danny to continue and his partner obliges.  “Her parents called me.  I couldn’t really make out what the mother was screaming through her hysterical ranting but it was something about ‘menace to society’, ‘child endangerment’ and ‘sociopaths’.”

“Yeah, Ron and Hinds were definitely those,” Steve agrees. 

Danny clarifies, “She wasn’t talking about them.  She was talking about us.”

“If you couldn’t understand her, how do you know that she was talking about us, not them?” Steve counters.

“Because her husband took the phone away and told me that he didn’t want Lucy associating with Grace anymore because it was ‘too dangerous.’  He actually thinks my precious daughter is a danger to his kid.”  Danny’s indignation is clear in his tone.

“That’s ridiculous.  Can you imagine how much worse it would have been if we weren’t there?  All those little girls against those two sociopaths?”

“After I calmed him down, I explained that to him,” Danny assures Steve.  “He didn’t have all the facts.  He only knew that his daughter had been taken hostage and forced to walk through a rain forest at gun point, where she witnessed one perp shoot an innocent man and another perp kill his partner.   That’s not something an eleven year old gets past quickly.”

Steve suggests, “I’ll talk to her.  I can help her through it.”

Danny knows Steve’s heart is in the right place but he also knows Steve had more potential to make things worse.  “Lucy is an eleven year old child, Steve.  She’s not one of your SEALs who you can tell to buck up,  that men get killed during the fog of war.”

“They do and you move on,” Steve protests. 

“That’s fine for GI Joe.  It is not the way a little girl needs to process what happened to her.  I gave the family the number for the Violent Crimes Victim Advocacy program and suggested that they get Lucy some PTSD counseling,” Danny explains.

Now Steve is even more concerned. “You actually think Lucy has PTSD?  We weren’t out there that long.  I kept telling her things would be alright.  She acted like she understood.”

Danny pats Steve’s arm reassuringly.  “I don’t know if she has PTSD or not.  Let’s hope she doesn’t but she still needs to talk to somebody.  Grace was pretty shook up about the whole thing.  The only reason she’s here now is that Stan, not Rachel, met her at the station.”

“You don’t think Rachel’s gonna use this as an excuse to try to interfere with your custody again, do you?”  Steve is ratcheting up to a good Danny-style rant if that was a possibility.

“I wouldn’t put it past her, but Grace was pretty adamant that you and I are the heroes in all of this,” Danny downplays the possible personal ramifications of the camping fiasco.  “Stan was pretty cool.  I think he’s learning that I’m not the enemy in all of this.”

“You’re her father. . . . her Danno,” Steve pronounces as if that magically erased the last 36 hours.

Danny smiles gratefully at Steve.  The man may be a bit intense and way too much for the Aloha girls but has the heart of a lion and truly takes the ideas of ‘ohana’ and ‘loyalty’ to their extremes.  There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for Grace, which comforts Danny immensely even when Steve is at his craziest.

After draining his Longboard, Steve yawns as he set the bottle down on the end table beside him. 

“You outta here, babe?” Danny asks.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?  I was invited to a living room camp out,” Steve reminds him.

Chuckling, Danny assures him, “That doesn’t mean you have to sleep on the floor of my apartment when you have a perfectly nice bed at home.”

“Grace invited me and I’m staying.  When else am I going to get a chance to camp in your living room again?”  When Danny doesn’t immediately respond, Steve worries that he overstepped his bounds.  “Unless you don’t want me to sleep with your daughter?”

At Danny’s raised eyebrow, Steve backpedals,  “That came out wrong.”

Even though Danny had understood what Steve meant, it was fun to tease him.  Allowing his face to relax into a smile, Danny calms his fears.  “Hey, if you wanna sleep in a tent on the floor of my apartment, who am I to deny you?”

“Isn’t that where you’re sleeping?” Steve inquires.

“Well I was gonna go sleep in my bed,” Danny admits sheepishly.  No further invitation was forthcoming although Steve would not have said no if the offer had been extended.

“And abandon Grace?” Steve teases.  Danny would never abandon his daughter.  “We were supposed to camp for two nights.  We should still be out in the woods but you’re just gonna take the easy way out?  What kind of an example are you setting?  Some Aloha Girl you are.”

“I already told you I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts,” Danny reminds him.

“You can’t do that to Grace.”  Rising from the couch, Steve jerks his head toward the tent.  “C’mon I was looking forward to one more night of sleeping next to you in a tent.”

Danny doesn’t know what to do with that declaration so he simply lets it slide.

As Steve takes another step toward the tent, Danny sighs and heaves himself off the couch.  “Lemme check all the locks and brush my teeth.”

“Actually,”  Steve says, “You hit the head first, I’ll grab my go bag out of the truck so I can do that too.  I’ll lock up.”

Danny is still in the bathroom flossing with the door open when Steve returns, small shaving kit in hand.  Like they’d been living together for years, Steve steps around Danny, grabs the toothpaste off the counter and begins his own nightly routine.  By the time Steve emerges from the bathroom, Danny has turned off all the lights in the apartment except the small one over the stove.  Holding his finger over his lips in the universal sign for be quiet, Danny opens the tent flap and allows Steve to crawl to the far side of a sleeping Grace.  Once he is sprawled out by her side, Danny edges in on her other side.  Sitting up he reachs to zip up the tent when Steve whispers “Leave it.” 

Leaning over Danny places a soft kiss on his daughter’s forehead.  “ ’Night sweetheart.”   

Steve follows his lead but didn’t take his eyes off Danny almost as if he were asking permission.  “ ’Night Grace.”

Steve lays on his back, long legs sticking out the tent flap.  The last days had been eventful and they were taking a toll even on the stoic commander.  He is asleep in no time, content to be spending time with his favorite father-daughter duo. 

Danny can’t get comfortable. His arm still hurts from where he’d been shot.  He was glad he’d put some extra towels under the sleeping bags for a little padding.  Reaching over, he curls Grace into his side, needing to feel her heart beat.  The deeper breathing of a sleeping SEAL is oddly calming too. 

Steve awakes first, his internal clock set to 1500 Zulu (5:00 a.m. Hawaii time).  At first he’s not sure where he is.  The ground underneath him his hard.  He’s in a tent and there’s a grown man pressed to his side.  He doesn’t remember going on a mission.  Then the man starts to move and mumble.  He’d recognize that blonde hair anywhere even if he rarely gets to see it this messy.  They are in Danny’s living room, ‘camping’ with Grace.  Wait, where’s Grace?!  Shoving his sleeping partner a little harder than necessary, Steve barks, “Wake up!  Where’s Grace?”

At the mention of his daughter’s name in Steve’s gruff tone, Danny’s eye’s fly open.  He instantly realizes that he’s spooned up against the taller man’s side.  His arm is over Steve’s waist and their legs are tangled together.  They were apparently snuggling in their sleep.  Danny sits up and jumps back as if Steve were suddenly made of acid.  Frantically his eyes scan the small tent, as if there had been room to hide in the tiny enclosure.  “Grace!” he calls climbing out of the tent followed by Steve who is also on high alert. 

Standing up, Danny stops and Steve bumps into his back.  Grace is curled up under a blanket on the couch but their stirring started to rouse her.  “Why are you shouting?” she mumbles trying to wipe the sleep out of her eyes.

Danny immediately softens at the sight of his baby girl.  Sitting on the edge of the couch he pats her small thigh.  “What are you doing out here, Monkey?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she explains.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Danny asks, concerned that the camping trip had more of an effect on her than he initially realized. 

“Sort of.  I dreamed I was the stuffing in a big hot sandwich.”   

“Okay,” Steve draws out the word, trying to let her statement sink in to see if it makes any more sense.  He’s looking at Danny for help but despite being the actual dad, Danny is just as perplexed.

Graces waves between the two of them dismissively.  “You two are squishy.  You are both so hot and I was stuck in the middle.  I couldn’t get either one of you to move so I just came out here.”

Both men gape at one another. 

“It was better this way.  You just cuddled each other, kinda like Danno and mommy. . . before,” Grace’s small voice drops  to an even softer octave because sometimes she can’t help but miss the time when her parents were still together.

“Grace, honey,” Danny begins, “Ah. . . Steve and I . . . it’s not like that.”

“Danno,” she huffs, exasperated at her clueless father.  “Sure it is.  You love Uncle Steve and he loves you.  I have eyes you know.”

Looking to Steve for support, all Danny gets are Steve’s hands raised in mock surrender and a negative head shake to indicate that Danny was on his own. 

Desperate for a change in subject, Danny suggests, “What time did you say kids’ day at the range started?”  


End file.
